


sun doesn't rise in space

by hellbrain420



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, F/F, F/M, Language Barrier, Pale Romance, Polyamory, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:32:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellbrain420/pseuds/hellbrain420
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Galaxies are pretty when they’re on computer screens but in real life they just make you feel so tiny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Nobody goes into space because they want to go into space. You, personally, went into space because there was nothing left for you on dismal dirtball Earth. Anybody you ask will say the same; not in the same words, not in the same dolorous tone, but you all have a generically kindred mythos. They have their own stories. You have yours. You don’t care what they did, what happened to them, at what point in time nothing beckoned more than the blankest, blackest slate available, because _you_ know what _you_ did and what happened to _you_ and that’s already far too much, so you indulged your avoidant tendencies one last time. Now you have been on this disgusting, echoing ship for three weeks. You forget what fresh air tastes like. You also forget what fresh food tastes like. 

You could really appreciate a fat peach right about now. You’d let the juice dribble down your chin and everything. 

*

Dave Strider, you have surmised, is an intolerable parody of a gentleman but he is also brilliant so you do not mind him too much. He can keep pace with you. His brain goes fast enough that he can bring a conversation to full fruitation with you at any time, the only highschool dropout to ever do so. Only person at all, really, to do so. A lot of people don’t notice him like he deserves because all they hear is his Texan accent and his impudence before writing him off as trailer-park trash, but you think he likes it that way; when it’s just you talking to him from the bunk over his during the designated rest periods, he has no problem dropping the accent completely. 

The two of you run a very snide, very illicit commentary on your superiors most of the time. You start off the initial critique with a scathing overview of how so-and-so handled this situation or whatnot, and then Dave takes your spark and twists it into this lucid looping metaphor that you have to actually concentrate on so that it makes sense from beginning to end. He should be a writer, you tell him. A writer, or a journalist, or a comedian at the very least. From his responses to these suggestions, you guess the reason Earth never worked for him was because of this subliminal sort of self-loathing he employs. 

You do not outright ask him why he left, because that would be rude. Nobody talks about things like that here. 

*

Instead of being worried by seeing honest-to-God aliens, you are relieved. You had no doubts that there were aliens out here to bump noses with; any way you dice it, existence is too big for just humans to embark upon the spacefaring age. Their appearance puts your mind at ease. You had worried that when you encountered aliens, they would be so utterly unreal you couldn’t tell what was head and what was tail, what was proboscis and what was fin. If they were carbon-based at all, that is. What if they were just clouds of intelligent gasses floating around, shot through with an approximation of nerves? What if they were blobs that gurgled for means of communication? What if they were made of something else entirely, something that your human brain couldn’t fathom? 

But the aliens are tall and sleek and undeniably humanoid as they worm their way up from your minute docking bay, their shuttling ship seething with biotechnology. They have two arms, two legs, they have faces and necks. They even have what looks like hair, wild and shiny black, coarse enough that it seems to be more like plant fibers than any hair you have ever seen. They have fangs, sure, and claws and horns and their eyes are bright gold in inquisition, with different colored irises on each one: maroon, teal, green, and there is no way to tell what the base coloration scheme is at work behind their irises. They speak in a language where the sounds all seem to come from the deep hollows of their chests, and every so often a beautiful noise is produced straight from their mouths, at the brim of pellucid, so high and perfect you become petulantly jealous; you couldn’t have even orchestrated such a note on your violin. 

Then they begin to kill everybody in sight and you take off. Of course such interesting creatures would want to kill. Their muscles flow together with such heavenly polish, and their eyes flicker so fast, that they could only be made for murder. Their brutality astounds you, their drive to wipe out a pacifistic group of the unprotected that they have never before encountered. They do not seem to care if you could have offered them something, if you could have stricken up a cultural exchange. Theirs is not a race that dwells on scientific findings, you think as you work with Dave to pry the covering off of an air vent. 

The one shortcoming of these aliens is their size: even their shortest is a good couple of inches taller than your ship’s tallest crew member. The air vents, barely big enough to fit Dave and you, could never admit one of them. You shuffle as far back as you can on hands and knees, so that all the sounds of massacre are muted off of the trembling sheet metal, and sit it out with Dave. Neither of you talk because there is nothing to talk about. 

From that point on it feels as if you are, for lack of a more gender-sensitive term, dead men walking. 

*

You sit in that vent until the ship goes completely silent. Then Dave shifts, slowly, _slowly_ , and starts to crawl back out. You are so sore from being crammed in here, and he is much taller than you so you can only imagine how sorry of a state his back must be in. The hall outside has…remains in it that, at times, are more liquid than solid (there are shards of bone, _shards of goddamn human bone_ , at the toe of your boot). There is only more around the corner. 

You hold you nose and Dave doesn’t look down. 

You walk the entire ship with him (every crawl space, every broom closet, every dormitory, every lab) and there is nobody left with a pulse, though the corpses are in no short order. Just you and him, abandoned in space. You go to the control room and manage to send a few messages back to Earth, but they will take days to arrive, then an additional three weeks for any sort of rescue mission to reach you should they have a ship and crew ready to leave at the drop of a dime. If they decide you are worth rescuing at all. You don’t say that there are only two people left, hope you convey the insinuation that there are enough people left to justify plumbing the dregs of space. 

There is plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of air. This ship is stocked to sustain over three hundred people for half of a year. You have no chance of dying of natural causes. 

Is boredom a natural cause, though?

*

You hole up in the captain’s room. It is decorated to give some semblance of nobility, but under the wall hangings there is heartless metal. It’s like somebody took the sterile room in which the lethal injection is administered, put a vase of sunflowers in it, and called it a home. But the bed is big and soft, so you twine up around Dave and fall asleep. 

The air is so, so cold in space that it makes a warm body next to yours all the better. 

*

You find the alien survivor soon after. 

There are a few of their corpses left behind (they didn’t even bother with their dead) and you and Dave poke them, study them. Their skin is tough and their jaws are too long and their tongues are even longer than that. Their blood is all different colors, correspondent to their eye color. They don’t have bellybuttons. All of their horns are different. Dave insists on unbuttoning one of the corpse’s pants just to see what alien junk looks like, he says, but you leave him there. 

That’s how you run across her—you think it’s a her, by the small pads of fat on her chest, but you can’t be sure with aliens. You’ll just call the alien a her for simplicity’s sake. She is stretched out in the mess hall on top of one of the tacky tables. She stares at the ceiling with overlarge eyes, cold as so many insects, and breathes very, very shallowly. Her breathing sounds like nothing that would issue from a pair of lungs; it sounds much more complex than that. Maybe she is full of chambers, maybe their abdomen is like one big heart, an organic crescendo thrumming and squishing in an unbearably complex synchronicity… 

Somebody has taken the initiative to shove something through her midsection; upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a horn snapped clean off of some other alien’s head. Well. This must be humiliating. 

“Hello.” You greet her cordially, sitting on the table next to her. She doesn’t make any noise. There is blood on her dark mouth, fresh blood, shimmery green blood. “My name is Rose.” 

Of course she doesn’t understand a word of what you’re saying. She blinks slowly, shifting her tongue around in her mouth. Fangs poke out over her bottom lip. 

“Would you like me to remove that? It looks detrimental, not to mention painful.” You gesture at the horn. She glances down, not raising her head. Then she makes a very unhealthy hissing noise from the back of her throat. You decide you should try to pull the horn free. Maybe then you could snatch a glimpse of the thoracic bellows that may be waiting underneath her skin, or something even more fantastic. 

You yank it out quickly and without any warning. It’s barbed on the end and only tears her up more and she is so cold, permeating cold like space, and she screams in this strange bubbling way. She immediately lashes out. Her fingers don’t have the pretense of fingernails; it just seems like the already hard skin hardens even more into five darkly stained claws that snag into your side and take out a more than adequate serving of your skin, soft as soap and twice as white. She looks at your blood in amazement, glistening bright red on her fluted hand. 

Ow. 

_ Ow _ .

Dave runs in. He heard her scream, obviously, and now he sees you bleeding quite profusely all over your neutral white-gray-beige clothes, the ones immediately issued when you took your inaugural step onto this ship. He curses as he scoops you up, sparing the alien a disinterested glance while he whisks you off to the captain’s—to _your_ room. You are dumped hastily into the adjoined bathroom, left with harried instructions to get your shirt off and get in the tub, if you can manage such a complex task (he doesn’t put any snark into his jibe, and it was a lazy effort anyways). Dave leaves you alone, off to get whatever else, and you do as he says, sitting as primly as you can in the bathtub as you don’t stop bleeding. You feel a bit unsteady. 

Looking at your soggy shirt on the floor puts four quarts of blood into bitter perspective. 

He returns with supplies from one of the first-aid kits that are hanging in the halls. He turns the water on, grabs the showerhead—it’s one of those detachable ones—and starts rinsing at the gashes along your ribs. He talks to himself the entire time.

“Don’t fuck up again.” He says once. “God _damn_ it, Strider, just…not this. Not twice.” 

*

You don’t die, which you are very happy about. The scratches hurt a lot, but they aren’t too deep and Dave wraps you up so tightly with gauze and Neosporin that it is more like wearing a Victorian corset than bandages. He’s done this before. His hands are so steady, with scars on his knuckles, that you can’t help but trust him as he works with precision stoked by mania—who knows how much he likes you, but nobody wants to wait three weeks in space all alone.

When you go to bed, he keeps his arms around you. He’s _protecting_ you, and it’s such a compassionate idea (a foreign one, too) that you push back against him and wedge your head under his chin.

“You can relax, Dave.” You say just a little louder than a whisper. “I’m fine now.” 

He gives a disbelieving grunt and holds you tighter. 

*

When you wake up, you demand to go see the alien again, see if she’s still alive. Dave doesn’t want you to get out of bed. You remind him that your legs were at no point injured and that you are in near perfect physical condition exempting your five new trophies of interspecies diplomacy. He concedes. You shortly realize how involved the entirety of your body is in just walking and it takes you much too long to get to the mess hall, his hands skimming at your waist the entire time in preparation for what he has convinced himself is the inevitable. 

The alien is no longer on the table, but you can follow the trail of jade green blood and find her in one of the storage closets, passed out on an industrial-sized bag of white rice. She doesn’t look very good. You sit by her head and poke at her ridged cheekbones that curve in funny ways around her eyes. It takes a while, but she drags herself back to consciousness. 

When she wakes up, she croaks out something in her native language that you would bet translates roughly to ‘oh God, not these jokers again’ (or, alternatively, ‘is dying in peace too unreasonable a thing to want?’). She closes her eyes in her equivalent of annoyance. 

“Hey.” You grab her around the chin and shake her head a little. She groans and slits her eyes open so all you can see is a crease of bright gold and green on her pale gray face. Paler gray than it was the last time you saw her. 

“We should just kill her,” Dave says. “You know, like a pity kill.” 

You sigh heavily. 

“Seriously. Look at her. She’s pretty much dead right now.” 

The alien says something more, but this time you can’t guess what she means. Her tongue moves in expressive ways against her long teeth, in ways yours never could, to make these bright, trilling noises to compliment the deeper sounds. She seems alert, she seems smart even. 

“My name is Rose.” You repeat from yesterday. “Rose.” You point at your chest. Then, more slowly, “Rose Lalonde.” 

Dave groans in dismay behind you. “Please do not go Dances with Wolves on me; space madness isn’t supposed to set in this early…” 

“Rose.” You repeat, looking her in the eyes and pointing at yourself. She clears her throat a little and makes a sound that could be misconstrued as your name. She tries again, this time making it more believable. Then again. She ends up close enough, hissing the ‘s’ and curdling the ‘r’ in her throat like a strange hybrid between a French and Russian accent. 

Dave snorts. “Tatanka, tatanka.” He chirps mockingly behind you, hunching his back and sticking his pointer fingers above his head in a distasteful emulation of buffalo horns. 

Without missing a beat, you point at him and say, in the same clear voice you used to get her to understand your name, “arrogant fuckwit.” 

*

You convince Dave to help carry her to your room. She’s too tall for just one of you to manage, probably six and a half feet you’d guess. You grab her under the arms and lean her neck and head back against your stomach. Her horns—asymmetrical, but with svelte enough curves to retain similarity—poke your chin if you aren’t careful. He takes her around the knees and you awkwardly stagger down the corridors like that. She protests a little at first, snarling, but then lapses into coughing and the wound in her stomach starts to bleed a little. Once you get her on the floor of your room you roll her stiff, armored shirt up. It feels like it’s made of something living, with a thickness akin to rhinoceros skin. 

When Dave sees the hole in her stomach, he makes a low whistle and shakes his head. 

“Where’s the first-aid kit.” 

“She’s done for, Rose; we’d just be wasting resources.” 

“Why do I not hear compliance?”

“Rose…” He warns. 

“Yes, what is it, my most docile, agreeable Strider?” 

He sighs and puts his hands up a little in defense, a gesture that says he’ll humor you by at least trying to save the life of an alien who probably killed people you used to work with. You know she’s doomed as well but it would be cruel not to try. 

*

As Dave attempts to patch her up, she points at herself and makes a lovely, almost nebulous noise that you take is her name. There is no way you can possibly get it right, but you scratch out the rough idea of the tintinnabular ensemble, like a poorly translated text: “Kanaya?” She seems to accept that you are physically incapable of proper pronunciation and settles for that. 

You talk with her while Dave works, because if you were in her situation you would appreciate a distraction as well. You point to yourself and Dave and say “Human. We’re human.” 

She says it as hee-oo-mahn, with a strange gurgly tinge towards the latter part of the word. She points to herself again and makes a noise that you smooth out to fit your vocal chords. It ends up as troll. 

From then on, you two become Rose Human and Dave Human. You call her Kanaya, but Dave insists on returning the favor: Kanaya Troll. It plays out like a very shitty sci-fi movie. You decide against broaching surnames for now. 

Do trolls even have surnames?

What about simple familial ties?

Blood relations?

Mothers?

*

On the third day, or the third whatever passes as a day in deepest space, Kanaya is dead. Neither of you are surprised. You wrap her up tightly in a spare sheet, dabbing the blood from her mouth, and put her out in the hall for lack of better ways to dispose of her. There are already too many bodies in this place. 

What does surprise both of you, however, is when she does not remain dead. 

*

You are sitting on the edge of the bathtub and Dave is knelt at your side, stripping back your bandage corset to let the wounds breathe. There is a polite knock on the door and both of you freeze; his fingers shaking ever-so-slightly over the puckered edges of your gashes. Then Kanaya pokes her head in, literally glowing a gently pulsing diamond-white, and smiling triumphantly. 

“Oh, what the actual _fuck_ …” Dave mutters. You blink a few times and then gesture for her to walk into the bathroom all the way. She does. There is still a gaping hole in her stomach, though it has stopped bleeding completely. She seems to have poked her organs back inside of herself. How sentimentally macabre, how undeniably professional. 

“Rose Human? Dave Human?” Then she starts babbling in her language, very excited, and you and Dave share a questioning look. She finally gives up on failing to express herself through words and lunges forward. Dave tenses immediately, but she only wraps an arm around each of your necks and hugs you both. You can feel her smile against your shoulder. 

Note: smiles and hugs are universal gestures. 

You feel like you have just made the biggest discovery in the history of humanity.

*

You and Dave are unable to figure out what happened to Kanaya. You watched her die; you even held her hand and closed her eyes when she stopped breathing. But she is perfectly fine now, bursting with energy. She flits around the bedroom and bathroom, sponging blood stains from the floor with stray towels and dusting. It turns out she is an utter busybody and doesn’t stop moving until both rooms are as perfect as they can be, given the materials. 

She leaves the room after a while. You sit next to Dave on the bed. 

“Now what?” Dave asks. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean, what do we do with her now that she’s not dying? She could decide to kill us at any moment.” 

You gesture at the newly tidied room, at the perfectly made bed you are sitting on. It is all done with your trademark surgically adroit sarcasm. Dave huffs. 

“Seriously. It could all be a ruse. She came here with a bunch of people looking to kill us.” 

“Kanaya’s indebted to us; we could have just let her die alone, but we—”

“Rose. Rose, you’re being stupid. In case you haven’t noticed, she is a goddamned alien and that means she has an alien moral code. All the rest of them came in and killed us without trying to talk first. She doesn’t think like us; she isn’t human.” 

You almost say something about how she used a hug as a gesture of kinship, of thanks, of happiness. Then you realize that saying that would be just about the weakest excuse you ever cooked up. It isn’t rooted in anything solid. It doesn’t actually mean anything. You just feel like it should, though. 

*

Kanaya returns streaked in slimy blood. You put a warning hand on Dave’s shoulder to keep him from lurching forward and attacking her. She is smiling still, mutters something as she darts into the bathroom to wash up. She comes out with a clean face and the stains on her shirt diluted to an entirely grim shade of pink. 

She starts walking over to you, like she wants to join you on the bed, but Dave takes you by the arm and leads you into the hall. He closes the door on her puzzled expression. 

“What are we going to do about her?” He demands. You shrug, glancing around. This is a mistake, because you see all the bodies in the corridor, stretched out like speed-bumps. They are beginning to stink. 

“Nothing. She seems fine.” 

“She’s pretending.” 

“We don’t know that.” 

“I know that.” 

“Dave. Don’t be difficult.” 

“I’m not being difficult, I’m being realistic.” 

You glare at him and he glares right back. You turn and start to walk down the corridor. He seethes behind you and then follows at a distance. 

That is when you notice the bodies. One body in particular; there is a fresh, faultless bite mark on the side of the neck, and then another on the calf when whoever bit realized that when humans die, their blood pools in their legs. Your brain immediately jumps to a supernatural-themed conclusion about what happened to Kanaya. 

Good Lord, no. This is just too ridiculous. 

*

Turns out, though, it’s true. You, Rose Lalonde, really are drifting ass-backward through space awaiting rescue with a chipper alien vampire with an eye for interior design. And Dave Strider too. 

You are almost embarrassed over this. It’s just so stupid and improbable. It sounds like the plot-hole riddled carcass of an old sitcom. It sounds like the next month of your life.


	2. Chapter 2

You lay in bed next to Dave while Kanaya is out prowling the halls for a corpse she hasn’t sucked dry yet. She is getting restless over the quality of blood she has access to, you have noticed, and you are steeling yourself for the day she tries to get something fresh from the source. Dave does not like it, and you must admit that the prospect makes you a little uncomfortable. 

“Should we feel bad?” He asks you, right in your ear. His breath smells bad; you had fettuccine alfredo with garlic for dinner, all frozen, but the garlic was as potent as ever. 

“About what?” There are so many things to feel bad about in a place like this. 

“About what happened to them. I mean…fuck. We just hid in the vents, we let them die. We didn’t do anything…” 

“Dave.”

“We could have at least tried. We could have done something other than sit on our asses like a couple of cowards.” 

“Dave.”

“We listened to them dying, Rose, and we didn’t do a thing.” 

You turn over and glower at what you suppose must be his general face area; when it wants to be, space can be even darker than it is cold. 

“Dave, please stop talking. If we had gone out there, they would have killed us too. We weren’t cowards; we were smart. We did what everybody should have done.” 

“That doesn’t justify anything.” He sounds so angry. You reach your hands out and find his face. His jaw feels tight under your palms. “I would’ve rather done something than—”

“This is called survivor’s guilt. Don’t let it get to you.” 

“That’s bullshit. These people had families and friends waiting for them, and now they’re dead. Whoever they left on Earth is going to get some guy in a suit on their porch telling them why they’re now short one family member.” He says it like the same thing happened to him, once. 

You are quiet. You feel like you shouldn’t say what you are about to. 

“We both know,” you start very, very quietly, “that nobody goes into space if they have somebody left on Earth.” 

He makes a terrifically desperate noise in his throat. 

“Their death was inevitable. It may have even been a blessing.” 

You press your lips to the corner of his lips, then directly on his mouth. 

“Now please, go to sleep.”

*

If a rescue mission was sent immediately after your message hit Earth, you have a minimum of three weeks left in space. You begin to wish you knew how to pilot this ship because the week that has already passed has been painful enough. You can’t do upwards of two more. 

Dave starts to shut down. To most, this wouldn’t be obvious, but you can see him decomposing in his own skin. Every time you journey with him to the mess hall to find food, the muscles in his back wind a little tighter as you step over the bodies together. They are starting to absolutely reek, so one night when Dave is asleep, you slip out of bed. He wakes up to ask where you’re going; nobody you have ever known sleeps as lightly as he does, and all that says is that horrible things have happened to him. You assure him you’re just going to the bathroom. He says he doesn’t believe that and goes back to sleep. 

You creep into the hall. The emergency lights are always on out here, mottling everything in too bright light that makes you look paler than you are, gives your skin a yellow-green tint and makes the blue veins on your arms stand out like fine needlework. It slugs unnecessary enunciation onto the heavy bags under your eyes. (Same bulbs they use in hospitals and you know that one tale too well; you know why you flinch when fluorescence highlights your disturbingly mortal veins).

You stare at all the bodies and for the first time in a week of trekking over this minefield daily, you feel sick. Your throat bobs and you swallow thickly. You curl your fingers and resolve that yes, you are indeed going to clean out every last body. They will go in the trash chute and rot in the belly of the ship. God. You’ll swab the crusted remnants from the floors and walls and, in some places, ceilings if just to get Dave to unwind and breathe again. 

Over to the nearest corpse. You kick it over with your toes. Her eyes aren’t even closed. You bend down and your fingers touch her rigid, bruised skin. She seems to have died from an acute case of large blunt object administered gratuitously to the esophagus and sternum. You gulp again and grab her by the wrists and start to drag. 

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. 

*

You clean out three entire corridors before you run into Kanaya. She looks as perky as usual, but her expression immediately shoots to concern when she sees you. You are pallid and shaky and more than a little nauseous. You are having a hard time seeing straight or walking straight or even just thinking straight. You never thought that the dead could hurt you more than the living. As things turn out, they have their own ways. 

She ghosts after you as you clear out a fourth corridor, then a fifth. Your clothes, your hair, the spongy flesh behind your eyes, it all smells like death. Finally you let yourself lean against the wall and slowly dribble onto the floor in a mush of too-young girl in a too-old world. You don’t care if Kanaya sees you shake all over because she doesn’t matter, not like Dave matters, and she can’t possibly tell Dave that you are anything less than one hundred percent fine at all times. 

As you shiver and bite your lip until it bleeds so you don’t cry, Kanaya sits next to you. She holds you and even though she is so horrifically cold, it’s nice. You can’t hear her heart, you can’t hear her lungs, her prophesied aortal abdomen; her entire body is a stalled machine. You quiver all over shamelessly and keep biting your torn lip. She dips her face down to your level and laps at your blood with her comedically long tongue. 

That isn’t the strange part. The strange part is that you don’t feel the need to push away from outside concern and strike yourself open for your casual witness. The strange part is that you let her, is that you anchor her down to you with your violinist fingers. 

*

In the control room, there is a giant clock that keeps track of how long the ship has been in space. You have been alone for one month, have been in space for almost twice that long. You don’t need to visit the clock to know, though, because Dave is incredible with time. He’s like a clock himself. You can ask him how many weeks, how many days, you’ve been here, and he gives the right answer without fail. 

“I’ve always been able to do it. Nothing special.” He shrugs it off. 

After a month, you stop asking him for the time. You also abandon the control room, except to check in to see if any messages have arrived on your end of the connection. They are messages that are never sent, never received, never read. 

Each and every time you enter, you keep your back to the clock. You do not wish for reminders of your abandonment. 

*

When all the halls are clean (Dave never asks why you’re doing it, he never even acknowledges it) Kanaya approaches you, wringing her hands. She points at her fangs, then at your neck. You sigh very melodramatically. Here it comes. The inevitable shitstorm, the result of being one of two remaining bloodbanks. It makes things slightly better that she looks bashful about it, like she doesn’t want to impose on you or anything, but it’s just that she really is terribly hungry…

Again, you sigh. Dave is in the shower, which means he’ll be out of your hair for the better part of an hour. Nobody left to complain but you then. In the end, anyways, it is your decision, your blood you’ll enable her to, your pain—you lead Kanaya out of the bedroom and into the mess hall; oh God, the irony. 

You take a seat on the table and beckon her over. Your head tilted to the side like a skewed globe, you go against every instinct you possess and bare the precious carotid artery to a predator; you twitch a little when her tongue finds how it trellises up, parallel your spine. Her eyes light up and her mouth is soft enough to balance out the intense pain of having two large fangs stabbed into your muscle. 

This is going to be sore for a while. 

*

When Dave next sees you he immediately notices the mother of all hickeys you are now resignedly sporting. He just looks incredibly disappointed. You want to flare up and defend yourself, but you know better than that. You can’t let him know he’s getting under you skin (more like you can’t let him know that having somebody actually care about you, your choices, your body, somebody who actually cares about any part of you at all actually…can’t let him know how uncomfortable that makes you). That would be admitting defeat and, as a Lalonde, you have been instilled with the rules for this hybrid of warfare and relationship to the point of neurosis. 

“Just…why? Why would you even let her do that?”

“What else is she going to eat? It’s the least I can do; she could just kill us, as you have said before.” 

You are really starting to hate how you don’t address Kanaya by her name in conversation. 

*

You sling the towel around your waist and stretch your left arm over your head, bending so you can better see the pink still-tender scars along your ribs in the spot on the mirror you have rubbed clean of steam. The skin around them is also uncharacteristically colored from the particularly hot water you always use to shower, but you can still make them out. They are healing nicely, five long slashes that follow the natural slope of your bones quite admirably. Even when looking to wound, Kanaya adheres to aesthetic appeal devoutly.

*

You catch Dave and Kanaya talking. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, slumped over with the heels of his hands spading into his eyes. She sits on the floor next to him, head on his knee and hands reaching up to pet his hair, hold his head. He’s talking and talking, and even though he hasn’t had to use his dorky Texas twang to keep up appearance for a long time, he’s lapsed back into it. 

Despite yourself, you listen for a little bit. He’s talking, so brokenly, about somebody named Dirk and somebody named Bro, who you quickly learn are probably the same person. He’s talking about a sweet, wonderful girl named Jade who he…he…who…he can’t even say it to an alien who won’t understand anything. You walk away from the cracked door, just in case he decides to spill, because if you can keep your secrets, then he should be allowed to keep his. 

* 

Tomato paste and canned black olives reveal themselves to be very helpful art supplies, so one day all three of you settle down in the kitchen and paint the walls. Dave really gets into it, and it looks like just one more thing that he has experience in. You dab your fingers in the tomato paste very carefully and make swirlies. Kanaya sniffs the paste, tastes it, recoils in disgust, and tries to wipe it off. A little gets on her pants and she immediately darts over to the sink to wash it off. She does take a shining to spearing the olives on her fangs and licking them off, like a dog with peanut butter. This leads you to think that, perhaps, trolls do not have a humanly relatable sense of dignity. 

By the time you start to get tired, an entire wall is covered in food. Your hands and large sections of your shirt are freshly adorned as well, but you aren’t worried; stains come out. And the shirt was pretty much falling apart anyways, one side almost completely shredded by Kanaya’s initial attack. Blood is harder to get out than tomato paste anyhow. 

You and Dave eat a dinner of stale croissants and freeze-dried icecream, basking in the cobbled ingenuity of your creation. Kanaya taps at her fangs and you offer her your wrist; just a little bit. You spent a while showing her where best to draw blood on a human and always tucked yourself away if she took too much, so by now she knows your limits. 

Dave is used to this but he still isn’t entirely comfortable with it. He refuses to watch. 

*

Dave has nightmares. He’s always had them, as long as you’ve known him and probably before that as well, but they seem to be getting worse the longer you stay in space. Whenever he wakes up, you wake up. Then you sit up the tiniest bit and rock his head against your chest, letting him hear your heart, and rub his back. 

He asks you if you ever get nightmares. You say you don’t even dream. Oh, of course you dream, but you never remember doing so. You haven’t remembered your dreams in ages. You explain to him how after…something…happened, you just stopped. You didn’t want to know what your subconscious was trying to break through to you. 

“We are so fucked up.” His smile makes an indent on the corners of your eyes. You can’t help but agree. 

*

It does not take long to figure out that Kanaya has nightmares too. At first you aren’t sure if she even needs to sleep, what with being undead and all, but you come across her one day wandering the halls. She has made some sort of nest in the corner of a small room, probably once functioning as a makeshift meeting room. Stiff, bloodied clothes stripped off of corpses long since disposed, food packaging, sheets swiped off of the crew bunks, resting her head on old shoes instead of actual pillows. She sleeps curled into such a tight ball that you feel it would be inhumane if you didn’t kneel down by her and try to unwind her; she looks like her bones, or whatever trolls have in lieu of, might be breaking from the pressure she imposes on herself. 

Your fingers just barely touch her shoulder and her eyes are wide open and bright as fever. She grabs you around the neck with one hand, her claws clasping together in back to fasten this newest string of pearls. Your pulse taps against her palm, hitching up as you realize breath isn’t coming as easy as it should. Above all else, you stay still. She watches you, pupils so large that they are rimmed with just the barest ribbon of green. Then she cautiously lowers her hand and draws back into her pile, growling a little. 

She does not smile. 

You stay there, feeling the bruises develop around your throat. She doesn’t seem apologetic in the least, so sharp and wicked like this. Again, you put your hands on her and start trying to smooth out the places where she is cinched into herself like a mess of botched seams. She gives tiny, pathetic warning growls occasionally but she doesn’t try to stop you. 

It takes so very long to completely unravel her but it happens. Once you’ve finished she won’t look at you, but puts the tips of her claws on your bruises and says one word. It doesn’t sound like anything you have ever heard before, but you have a feeling that it converts to English as ‘sorry’. You put your hand over hers and give her the smallest grin of placation. She returns it. 

*

Of course, it was inevitable, but you are just surprised that it’s Dave who suggests that you let Kanaya into your shared bed. It’s plenty big, too big for just you two, and more than that, it would be polite. You told him about when you found her and you know he immediately sympathized. He pretends not to care, and you pretend not to notice for his ego’s sake. 

“We’ve been here for what? Like, a month and a half almost? I think we can trust her.” He admits. You guess you won’t nag him for his earlier confidence that she was a threat that should just be left to die. He’s having his feelings time, and you don’t want to discourage that. 

So that night—or, more of, the time you have designated to be night—you take Kanaya to your bedroom and pat the bed. You have to do this several times and add in some encouraging gestures for her to walk over and sit down beside you. You nod and scoot next to Dave, who has already staked out his place. Slowly, she follows. 

Kanaya pokes and prods at the bed a whole lot; she obviously isn’t used to these, but you like to think that it’s more comfortable than sleeping in a nest on her own. She eventually lays down next to you, careful to keep a few inches of space between herself and you. If she straightens her legs out fully, her feet hang off the end of the bed. She tries to tuck her knees up into her stomach, into a knotty, dysfunctional clump, but you stop her. You aren’t going to let her recede into nothing here.

*

The nightmares are hard. Dave just gets rickety and remembers things he doesn’t want to, but Kanaya gets dangerous. If touched, she’ll lash out. For the next several nights sleeping all together, you do not get a lot of rest trying to keep the peace. You aren’t afraid of either of them, and while this does give you a few more bruises, you don’t mind. You’ve had worse. 

One night when Dave stutters into waking, he finally asks the question. “Why’re you out here?” 

“I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours.” Scar comparison, to see who has more justification for giving up. 

By the light that Kanaya gives off, you can see his brow crease. You know that she is peeping over your shoulder right now; all of you sleep lightly enough to wake at a shift in air pressure, and she always seems to know when one of you is worried. She presses her nose at your shoulder in reassurance. 

Just when you begin to think that Dave will have dropped the conversation, he says, “Fine.” 

“You go first.” 

“How is that fair?” 

“I’m waiting.” 

“You drive a steep price, Lalonde, but fine. I’ll go first if it’ll appease you. But once I’m done, don’t you pussy out on me. You’ve gotta tell too.” 

You cross your fingers over your heart. “Scout’s promise.” You squirm a little closer to him, close enough to feel the words incubate in his body before coming out. This is one of those times you’ve read about (but never experienced nope not once), when a person wants nothing more than to be touched and let know that there are other things out there, things that are soft and living and that know their name and have a mouth to kiss. Like she’s attached to you by a length of fishing line, Kanaya follows closely. 

He rolls his eyes and begins. 

Houston, Texas is where he’s from. Smack-dab in the center of the city. He lived with his parents and older brother until he was eight and his brother was eighteen. Then his brother took him and got an apartment and they lived there in a two-man wolf pack.

“What were you leaving?” You ask.

“A bad place. A really bad place.” 

You don’t press him. 

His brother didn’t make a lot of money, but he made enough; the real problem bucked its daunting head when his brother didn’t exactly make the wisest decisions about what to spend the money on. There wasn’t always food in the cupboards or clothes that fit or gas in the engine of their ‘magnificently awful’ Al Camino painted a most intriguing shade of pink, but there was always, always, always heat, electricity, and warm water. He says it like a point of personal pride. Like it was so much more than other people around him had, in the tone of voice that intellectuals use while talking about the one percent difference in genetics between Homo sapiens and Simia troglodytes. 

“I went to these shitty schools all my life. The staff didn’t care about anything more than the next paycheck. I didn’t learn a single fucking thing for the entire time I was there; twelve years, down the drain.” In elementary school, a teacher who showed up in slippers and hair curlers. In middle school, a teacher who smoked in the classroom. By highschool, the principal was coming into his office hung-over. 

Bro, as Dave calls his older brother, wanted him to go to a better school, but was a too paranoid to risk filling out any more paperwork than he already was. Neither of them wanted to be found out. But both of them, as you have hypothesized, were incredibly smart. So his bro taught Dave himself when he wasn’t too busy working. 

“Bro…he worked a lot of weird jobs. Got in with a lot of weird people too.” Dave doesn’t come out and say it, but you have a feeling that his bro was doing some less than appropriate things, probably with his body. “But he always had money, okay? I needed new pencils for school, he’d get me new pencils. You know?” 

His parents never went after them because they were sick and frightened and knew better than to get the authorities involved. Nobody was legal in that family. He says that once, and only once, his parents tracked them down, and the moment they did, his bro moved them as far away as he could while still keeping Dave in the same school. When he went from elementary to middle school, and then middle to high school, they always sent the forms to their parents to fill out. They came back a few days later, completed, and if they didn’t... 

“He’d just leave for an hour or two, take the car and everything. If the car was involved, it was serious shit. I don’t know what happened out there but he had the forms signed and everything when he got back. Bro was tough, you gotta understand. He’d do these things that a lot of people wouldn’t.” 

Dave says his only real friend through middle and high school was this quirky girl named Jade. She had recently immigrated to the United States in the middle of their seventh grade year and he was never quite sure where from. Some Pacific island, he thought. She was wild and loud and absurdly optimistic, and a lot of other people got annoyed with her, but he stuck to her like a particularly fond lamprey. They were the kind of friends that everybody assumed were dating, but he assures you it was never like that, not really, not…officially. 

“Then Bro got himself fucking arrested for…” (here he shakes his head, his fluffy hair tickling your chin), “And he told me that if that ever happened, I just needed to lay low in the apartment and act normal. But then people in suits opened the door and I ran. Down the fire escape and across the street, and I didn’t stop until I got to Jade’s house. And I thought she’d know what to do.” He goes quiet. 

“She didn’t.” 

“No. She didn’t have a fucking clue.” 

Dave never graduated highschool; his bro was arrested in the middle of his senior year, and after that he was hiding from any place that had his name in a filing cabinet. He returned to the apartment once, just to get some things he needed. People had been in it. People had been poking around in his stuff, in his bro’s stuff, and they’d messed it all up irreparably. He stayed with Jade some nights, when her parents were working late, and some nights he would stay with other friends who he quickly learned weren’t really his friends, not when push came to shove came to CPS questioning his whereabouts. 

“Sometimes I would sleep under the bushes in parks. I’d look at the sky and you can’t even see the stars in that city.” 

Jade went to college in California, UC Berkeley because she was smart with all sorts of science, and she took him with her. They moved a month after she graduated to a sad caricature of a living space. It met the health inspector’s standards, it left them with enough money to avoid starvation, but that never negated the dampness rolling down the walls or the odd sounds that would occasionally leak out of the pipes, sounds that were too expensive to fix but too ominous to properly investigate.

Things weren’t okay like that, but they tried. 

“We both tried. Really hard. We gave it our all, and it just didn’t cut it.”

“All you have to offer isn’t always what needs to be offered.” 

“That’s bullshit. We had nothing else to give.” 

Nobody will pay a highschool dropout a lot of money, especially not in northern California, so Dave was a pizza delivery boy during the weekdays and a floral arranger on the weekends. In his defense, he says that he has an eye for colors, and there is nothing unmanly about flowers. Flowers are the shit. 

Jade was always either studying or experimenting at their kitchen-counter laboratory or working as a waitress in what Dave admits was a pretty damn nice restaurant. She was wearing a black button-down shirt and jeweled earrings and everything when she’d get back from work, complaining how high heels hurt her feet. 

“We just sort of fell apart, I guess. I mean…goddammit, we lived together, we slept in the same fucking bed, and in a year we didn’t even know each other. It sucked and I couldn’t deal with it. She was actually doing something with her life, and I was pretty much just mooching off of her and pretending that I’d find Bro again some day.” 

Over the spring break of their second year in California, Jade left to go on a trip to the East Coast with a professor and some other students. Dave could only stay for one day alone and wrote a note and packed his bags and tidied up the whole apartment one last time before leaving. 

“It actually made me sick; I threw up twice. But I just left her with that stupid piece of shit note and decided that space was as good as anything, you know? They’re paying for you to live on a ship. You don’t have bills or a job; you just make sure the ship runs and you help the scientists if they need it. The ad said…you know what the ad said. Just for five months, if that.” 

“When we get back, are you going to see Jade again? Or your brother?” 

“Yeah. If you don’t have anywhere else to go, you can come too. You’d like them both.” 

“That sounds nice.”

Conversation breaks apart at that point in favor of well-deserved cuddling. You all sort of melt together in a prickly kind of caldron, a rat’s nest of limbs and hopeful support. You keep one hand under Dave’s head and the other is held by Kanaya. She doesn’t know what you are saying, but she isn’t obtuse either; she can pick up on sadness and once it’s detected, she won’t let go. 

“So what happened to you?” Dave asks quietly into your collarbone. 

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” 

“What? You said you’d—”

“Tomorrow.” 

*

Except, who would have guessed, tomorrow is the day that a massive ship arrives. A human ship. A ship that took nearly two months to get to you, but a ship nonetheless, and a ship that is opening up its underbelly for you to dock in. They send out tiny vessels that function as tugboats, getting your beaten bit of scrap metal to safety. Dave looks at you like he wants to demand your story, but you are too busy waiting for the port to fill up with oxygen so you can leave this place. If he could humiliate himself to such an extent, you would watch him beg to be regaled in your own pity party, and you would turn him away. Now that he has room to run, you don’t want to give him the incentive to. 

(You can’t be alone again once you’ve relearned how nice companionship is. And maybe you simply need to have somebody in your life that won’t look at you like you’re a monster, and doesn’t have any reason to think that they should.) 

As you walk out into the port, you and Dave stand on either side of Kanaya. She is nervous, fussing with her claws and ducking her head down. Her felted ears have nearly flattened themselves down her neck. Before leaving, you stand up on the tips of your toes—fourteen years of ballet finally shows its practical use—and kiss her. Dave does the same. Kisses have sort of become your culture-spanning sign of solace in the last week or two, because galaxies are pretty when they’re on computer screens but in real life they just make you feel so tiny. There is no way to tell her in words that things will be okay, and even if you could you don’t know if you would, because it might just be a lie. You both take hold of one of her hands, loosely so her claws don’t spear your flimsy skin, and walk out so whoever has finally bothered to rescue you can see all that is left of your exploratory mission. 

There are several people there, all in starched, official uniforms and severe expressions that simmer to the point of burning when they see Kanaya. You barely notice that she is a troll anymore, but this must be quite a shock for them. In your messages, you had told them you were attacked by aliens, but who would have believed it? Now you have proof. You gave them fair warning. 

“What is this?” One of the men asks. He seems to be in charge, with a lot of medals on his lapel. 

“This is Kanaya.” You and Dave say almost simultaneously. Kanaya smiles a little, keeping her lips over her fangs as best she can. 

“And just what is it?” 

“She,” you say pointedly, “happens to be a very nice alien vampire.” 

The man does not believe you. He does not believe any of this, probably. His expression says ‘are you shitting me?’ 

You have a feeling you are going to be getting that look an awful lot in the weeks to come.


End file.
